Is Charity Immoral?

[jacob]

Most nerdily, if it holds that f(a*x+b*y)=a*f(x)+b*f(y) or more primitively that f(ax)=a*f(x) or that f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y) which if you think about it is pretty much the same thing unless you're striving for some mathematical rigor(*) award or aren't just inserting numbers into functions, then f is linear. One might say that linearity is a matter of pragmatism. Linear functions are way easier to deal with so anyone who needs to compute some actual result will linearize problems ASAP. This has more or less been the standard approach of calculus for the past some two hundred years. It will stay that way until mathematicians figure out a way to integrate arbitrary functions. Anyhoo ... I suppose ... that might not be helpful. Hmm .. E

ssentially linear means "much is good, twice as much is twice as good". Alternatively, that if you understand a "small system" then you can understand a "big system" just by multiplying by a constant.

(*) A focus on rigor (as in rigor mortis) is often the sign of a intellectual stagnation ... or a recently deceased mammal.

[BRUTE]

what would be a common example of a non-linear system? Chernobyl didn't really work for brute because he imagines nuclear physics to be compl(ex/icated) enough as it is.

[7Wannabe5]

@BRUTE: The mechanism(s) by which the potato links the Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire to widespread political corruption in 20th century Chicago are complex.

@Jacob: Do you think Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is properly analogous with notion that climax state in ecology is really only a longer phase in a cycle ultimately governed by changes in the weather or atmospheric conditions?

I don't really understand how the concept of complexity can be divorced from the concept of chaos or randomness, since adaptability, or resilience, or anti-fragility have to do with the unknown-unknown. It's not a happenstance that the complex brain of the human species evolved at the chaotic edge between forest and savanna. You can't predict where lightning will strike in the forest, but you can predict that fruit will later likely be found where it does strike. One reason why the feminine energy is described as chaotic is that the process of sex randomizes, and sexual reproduction is a successful function because it increases the number of strategies available in the inevitability of chaos.

IOW, charity is moral when it tends towards increasing number of strategies (sharing/trading/teaching/preservative/creative)and it is immoral when it tends towards decreasing number of strategies (heavy handed, rigid, authoritarian, squashing, restrictive, narrow-minded, locked in the Missionary Position.)

[jacob]

@brute - Most IRL systems are nonlinear. It's actually rather rare to find a linear system IRL. Mathematically speaking, linear systems are easy, and non-linear systems are typically hard/impossible and only solvable by linearizing them. Mathematicians have thus spent a lot of time analyzing linear systems and deriving results that nobody else have any use for. The most common example of non-linearity is compound interest growth. Other examples include population growth, temperature dependent chemical reaction networks (e.g. a fire or a combustion engine), fluid dynamics (including air, so weather forecasts), and the general relativity field equations. Several of these have yuge money prices associated with an analytic solution.

Also, humans are notoriously inept in predicting/foreseeing nonlinear systems insofar they don't have a lot of experience.

@7wb5 - As far as I understand a climax stage is inherently stable and there's nothing in it that inherently causes it to become fragile ala Minsky. If it was part of a longer climate cycle in the Minsky sense, you'd be looking at a situation where biology would be changing the weather/climate patterns thus generating a feedback. This is entirely possible. The earth's atmosphere has oxygen in it because there's life (or a certain kind) on earth. Not the other way around. You're really moving into Gaia territory here. It's conceivable that Gaia would have some Minsky instability features. Those would happen on geological time although with our actions, we just might be speeding up that process by a lot, our species only took about 100,000 years to get relatively close to potentially creating a Canfield ocean. That's pretty fast.

One can certainly find a system that's both fractal, random, complicated, chaotic, and complex. It doesn't mean they all are though. Chaotic doesn't necessarily mean random, it means that the system changes entirely if you change the initial conditions slightly. Edge zones do mark a rather sharp boundary so it's plausible that such regions are chaotic as well as complex.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob: The grasses vs the trees is not stable because grasses prevail if conditions are low in CO2 and dry, and trees prevail when it is wetter and CO2 levels in the atmosphere are higher.

I wonder if Western civilization would have happened if mankind had not happened upon a mutant form of wild wheat that did not disperse its own seeds readily around 12,000 years ago? We already had the brains, we just didn't (yet) have a good form in which to store energy. I think the potato, corn and rice based civilizations all started independently around 2000 years later.

I learned about the grasses being the enemy of the trees and the friend of the humans by watching a BBC documentary series about the history of plants which was hosted by the geologist Iain Stewart. However, I already understood that trees make their own micro-climate damper, and that hunter-gatherers sometimes burned forests to plant crops, thereby mimicking the behavior of lightning. Obviously, we also mimic another behavior of lightning with the Haber-Bosch process, and the plants that are able to naturally fix nitrogen "eat" bacteria which break down sugars anaerobically. Oxygen cycle. Nitrogen cycle. Carbon cycle. Meat cycle. Sugar cycle. Energy cycle. Weather cycle. Reproductive cycle. Water cycle. Occasional random asteroid.

[BRUTE]

I wonder if Western civilization would have happened if mankind had not happened upon a mutant form of wild wheat that did not disperse its own seeds readily around 12,000 years ago? We already had the brains, we just didn't (yet) have a good form in which to store energy. I think the potato, corn and rice based civilizations all started independently around 2000 years later.

isn't agriculture the dominant theory as to what started off civilization?

[7Wannabe5]

@BRUTE:

Right. From the documentary "How to Grow a Planet" , I learned that the most recent discovery of oldest remains of "civilized" human settlement was made in region of modern-day Turkey, same time/same place as mutation of wild wheat to harvestable-by-human wheat occurred, 12,000 years ago. Agriculture of some kind likely existed prior to the mutation of wheat, but most crops are not as readily stored for long periods as wheat. For instance, potatoes (unless dehydrated into flakes) can only be stored for around 10 months under ideal conditions. Go into any market anywhere on the planet, and it is almost a given that the cheapest food you can buy per unit of calorie will be a grass seed processed into a form most conducive to long-term storage. When I was doing my experiment on feeding myself (and an unsuspecting housemate) on less than $1/day (no functional garden at the time), I pretty much had to default to baking bread and making soup most of the time.

I also learned from the Michael Pollan documentary "Cooked" that bread requires civilization as much as it fuels it. That's one reason why my perma-culture homestead will be growing potatoes, corn and beans rather than wheat in Zone 3. The processing of wheat lends itself to much greater division of labor and complicated tool requirement than the processing of potatoes. In fact, it's debatable whether wheat was first processed into alcohol or bread.

Anyways, it's pretty clear that the grasses are evil because they killed off the majority of mammals, the majority of the trees, and they caused humans to invent the institution of slavery in order to maintain the planet in a state of relative grass dominance over trees.

[BRUTE]

Anyways, it's pretty clear that the grasses are evil because they killed off the majority of mammals, the majority of the trees, and they caused humans to invent the institution of slavery in order to maintain the planet in a state of relative grass dominance over trees.

same could be said for civilization brute was never a fan.

[7Wannabe5]

@BRUTE: I think 80% primitive, 20% high civilization might be a good mix. My adult kids were recently jokingly complaining that I raised them to think that 80% severe frugality and 20% lush luxury (everybody in my household had their own used sofa, a pile of interesting books, layers of old-fashioned underwear to ward off the chill, and as many muffins made from a 50 lb. bag of oatmeal purchased for $2 at a rural food auction as they could possibly desire to consume) was the best mix. For instance, how much infrastructure do we have to maintain to retain the possibility of a symphony?

[BRUTE]

while brute hasn't figured out a ratio, he thinks about it in similar terms. brute pretty much always has the most expensive state of the art laptop, but prefers pads to mattresses, gas cooking to induction, doing laundry by hand to machine, sitting on the floor to sitting at a desk, brewing coffee in a simple french press to fancy electrical machines, doing push-ups to using weight machines..

fun analogy since brute just came from the "growing old in Silicon Valley" thread:

80% of civilization is not an improvement. just because something is innovative doesn't mean it's good. coffee is made by adding hot water to ground coffee. there's not ever a need for electricity, timers, or any other innovation made past the iron age.

sure, there are a few things that, to brute, are indispensable (maybe just because he's used to them), mainly computers. apart from computers, brute thinks electricity is overrated, if other heat sources are available. and the main advantage over making a fire that modern, civilized heat sources have is convenience, not efficacy.

[GandK]

80% of civilization is not an improvement. just because something is innovative doesn't mean it's good.

You're right. One of the things that irks me about a lot of poverty and charity discussions is the insistence by a small but vocal contingent that many of these modern "conveniences" are now a human right. And at least in the US, whenever you hear that something or other is "a human right," the speaker generally means that the government (read: taxpayers other than the speaker) should be providing it.

[Dragline]

I wonder if Western civilization would have happened if mankind had not happened upon a mutant form of wild wheat that did not disperse its own seeds readily around 12,000 years ago? We already had the brains, we just didn't (yet) have a good form in which to store energy. I think the potato, corn and rice based civilizations all started independently around 2000 years later.

isn't agriculture the dominant theory as to what started off civilization?

The book you want to read on this is "Guns, Germs and Steel". The thesis is that those parts of the world that had domesticatable plants and animals (like the fertile crescent and China) got a head start on developing complex civilizations that eventually overran those that had fewer of those options.

For how human values evolved from foraging to agricultural to industrial societies based on energy consumption patterns, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy2P5XkEPIs

Note, much of the world is now in a post-agricultural age that is more egalitarian than the agricultural age. This is one of the reasons slavery or serfdom has virtually disappeared in most places in the last few hundred years.

[BRUTE]

@GandK

well, that's true for all "rights". somebody has to pay for the police, somebody has to pay for the voting booth..

[GandK]

@GandK

well, that's true for all "rights". somebody has to pay for the police, somebody has to pay for the voting booth..

I'm fine with those, but would not call either a modern convenience that's now a "right" without which a person theoretically is lacking in dignity these days. Was thinking more of cell phones.

[jacob]

So just a matter of degree, eh?

Tribal politics (see middle class or red vs blue) is essentially an attempt to strike a balance between avoiding freeloading (right, what I'd suspect 7wb5 would name the 'masculine'(*)) and helping those in need (left, the 'feminine'). It's hard to escape because it's likely in our genes---and as such the human gene pool has phenotypes ranging from ultra libertarian to ultra commutarian. And humans have been arguing ever since ...

(*) Noting that around this particular time in history, that just happens to be the role currently played by dudes. Whereas the inclusive or helping role is currently being played by women of the opposite sex. However, as noted by Junger in Tribe, human male phenotypes are perfectly capable and will split into playing either role when required. I surmise that human female phenotypes will do the same when required. This makes sense because human survival really does require both orientations along with a healthy balance between them.

Now ...If cell phones are considered a want, then providing free Obama phones (a program that actually began during the Reagan administration, but who's(*) counting these days...) even for those who don't pay is freeloading. If policing is considering a need, then providing policing for those who don't pay is helping those in need. The endless debates on where to draw the line is called politics.

(*) Nobody, that's who!

During the dark ages, policing was not considered a need and the general murder rate was 10%---you had a 10% chance of dying due to murder. Not bad, but it's much much (about two orders of magnitude) lower today. Even the murder rates for Southside Chicago for young black males (the most dangerous occupation in the country when not counting the 60+ year old/obese/diabetic/smoker-subset) are ten times "safer" than the average medieval person.

The question where to draw the line remains ... it's a work in progress as history evolves. The most recent innovation in that regard seems to be how to turn in into pay-per-click ad-dollars and optimize the dollars/content ratio when it comes to talking about that progress---if it can still be so called.

PS: I note that even libertarians now consider personal defence to be a government issue. The hypocrisy of that position is in some sense pathetic, at least from the perspective of a medieval peasant.

[BRUTE]

The question where to draw the line remains ...

if more humans recognized that this line isn't given by god/nature/first principles/logic, but that it's personal and somewhat arbitrary, politics wouldn't be half as horrible as it is. at this point brute is pretty convinced that there isn't a "real" line that's still being found, but that it's just convention, a function of social, technological, and other factors of the time.

PS: I note that even libertarians now consider personal defence to be a government issue. The hypocrisy of that position is in some sense pathetic, at least if you're talking to a medieval peasant.

depends on what type of libertarians. some libertarians consider government police/military to be socialism (and they're correct). but many libertarians think there is a "minimum level of services" that the free market couldn't/shouldn't provide, yes. there's great infighting among libertarians as to where the "correct" line is to be drawn within libertarianism

[7Wannabe5]

jacob said: human male phenotypes are perfectly capable and will split into playing either role when required. I surmise that human female phenotypes will do the same when required. This makes sense because human survival really does require both orientations along with a healthy balance between them.

I don't disagree. Here is what David Deida, one of the modern proponents of sexual dichotomy theory has to say on the topic:

The whole spectrum of masculine and feminine qualities exists in all of us. On one side of the spectrum is the extreme feminine. It is like walking out into the dew of the garden and dancing in ecstasy, connecting with nature, connecting with life. But it may also be wild and unpredictable.

The extreme masculine, on the other hand, can concentrate on a task to the point of perfection, with no disturbance whatsoever and complete self-discipline. The extreme masculine, in a man or a woman, cuts through obstacles and penetrates to the core of the issue, persisting until the final goal is reached...

By freeing ourselves to express the entire spectrum, we become more whole as a man or woman. Even so, each of us will find our favorite place in the spectrum. And, each of us will be turned on most by a man or woman who expresses a unique "flavor" of masculine or feminine love.

That is why I said "optimization" or focusing on SWR was too masculine. I didn't invent sexual dichotomy theory. I only believe in it because one time on a first date with a man, I was tempted to do a bad thing because I was curious, so I followed the directions from a 1950s book on the topic, and literally said "I don't want to kill my own snakes." and made the face appropriate for saying something like that, and he immediately became madly infatuated with me. It's like scary voodoo powerful, but I don't try to exude feminine energy anymore because I don't want anybody to be madly infatuated with me because I want to finish some of my projects and then maybe go to Brazil.